For Union College’s Homecoming and Family Weekend now under way, the college has brought in some of its stellar alumni to speak to the students.
Dr. Kathy Magliato, class of 1985, is just one of them.
“The college is always looking to bring back its really successful alumni so the students can get an idea of where you can go with a Union education,” said Scott Rava, who works for Union’s Offi ce of College Relations. “Dr. Magliato is really fantastic because she wasn’t the typical med student. She didn’t have great test scores and SATs. She really had to work her way up.”
Work her way up she did. At the age of 43, Magliato is currently one of only a handful of female heart surgeons in the world. She also works beyond her capacity as a surgeon as a consultant and national spokeswoman about heart disease in women.
Magliato traveled to Schenectady from Los Angeles after an 18-hour surgery in order to speak to students during Homecoming and Family weekend, which runs until Sunday.
Magliato is currently a surgeon at St. John’s Medical Center in Santa Monica, Calif. She also serves as the hospital’s director of women’s cardiac surgical services.
Magliato grew up on an apple orchard in Highland, Ulster County. She said not many people from her small community went to college. Her father, Nicholas Magliato, graduated from Union in 1958 and brought her to the school to show his daughter what she could become.
“That experience opened so many doors for me,” Kathy Magliato said.
After enrolling in Union’s premed program, Magliato expanded her education by doing on-campus honors research labs where she got to perform minor operations on rats. She said her experiences at Union prepared her for medical school and also for attaining her master’s of business administration from UCLA, which she completed last year.
“Union was a place of discovery about myself and the world around me,” she said. “It made me an excellent student.”
She said most women are turned off by heart surgery because there are so few women in the field, and the road to success is long and hard.
“It is grueling training and a long road at a time when most women are thinking of marriage and having families,” she said.
Magliato chose to defer those dreams until later and now lives outside Los Angeles with her husband, who is also a surgeon, and two children.
She said that although her training was hard and the path was a tough one, she wouldn’t trade it. She is thankful that she gets to save lives every day.
“I am in love with the heart,” she said. “I feel that it is an honor and a privilege to get to touch it every day. How many people can say they have touched a human heart?”
Magliato’s father agrees that his daughter’s path was a tough one where she faced a lot of opposition from her male colleagues.
“It was tough, let me tell you. The old school boys put her through hell,” he said.
Helping people has always been a part of Kathy Magliato’s life. She began working at nursing home in high school and continues to want to make a difference today — by raising awareness about heart disease in women. She currently is on the board of the American Heart Association.
According to Magliato, most women know about breast cancer, but most are unaware of the deadly effects of heart disease. Heart disease is responsible for 44 percent of female deaths each year, she said, while breast cancer is responsible for 4 percent of the deaths.
Magliato urges women to know their numbers, including their cholesterol and blood pressure levels, eat a heart-healthy diet and exercise for 30 minutes fi ve times a week. She also encourages women, especially those over 55, to get a yearly cardiovascular exam.
Magliato hopes to use her MBA to consult with biotechnology companies to expand their businesses. She met with local biotechnology company CardioMag Imaging Inc. on Friday to consult with them on some new technology they are developing. She is also working with Dr. Robert Jarvic to run a clinical trial of his new artificial heart in the United States.
Magliato hopes to put her MBA to more use as the physical demands of surgery start to wear on her. She said she hopes to one day become the CEO or CFO of a medical technology company.
“I can only help one person at a time right now, but by working with these medical technology companies I have the ability to help thousands of people at once,” she said.